blackwood setting

Mystery, or the unknown, is a good trope to incorporate into your RPG. But, how far do you go before the players hit a brick wall of frustration and don’t know what to do or what path to pursue? Inspired by an email to us from Michael Drescher, we take a stab at providing some advice.

Some rpg systems have skills list for player characters. Examples of these are 3.x and 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, GURPS, Champions, Basic Role-Playing, and quite a few more. Whereas there are some older games as well as some modern OSR-based games that do not have skills inherently built into the system. Non-skill based systems abstract it out through the use of ability checks or even using character backgrounds – something Dungeon Crawl Classics does. We talk our preference.